EPA Watchdog: White House Blocked Part of Truck Pollution Investigation, Caused Lack of Public Information

The Trump administration pushed through an exemption to clean air rules, effectively freeing heavy polluting, super-cargo trucks from following clean air rules. It rushed the rule without conducting a federally mandated study on how it would impact public health, especially children, said the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Inspector General Charles J. Sheehan in a report released yesterday, as the AP reported.
Scathing @EPAoig report: "EPA Failed to Develop Required Cost and Benefit Analyses and to Assess Air Quality Impact… https://t.co/sBXXN5QwZr— John Walke (@John Walke)1575567742.0
The gift to the trucking and fuel industry was one of Scott Pruitt's last acts as EPA Administrator before he resigned under a cloud of ethics violations in July 2018. He was alleged to have used tax payer money for first-class travel, a security detail that surrounded him 24 hours per day, an inexpensive lease in a lobbyist's apartment, and secretive meetings with executives from the fossil fuel industry, as CNN reported.
The EPA inspector general not only faulted the EPA for failing to conduct a mandatory study into air pollution and how it affects children's health, but also the White House budget office for failing to provide requested information, according to CNN.
"The lack of analyses caused the public to not be informed of the proposed rule's benefits, costs, potential alternatives and impacts on children's health during the public comment period," the report reads.
The office "refused to provide ... specific responses or documentation," the inspector general said Thursday, as CNN reported. The office claimed that the information was "particularly sensitive."
"Such actions call into question the quality of EPA rulemaking processes and leave the public and stakeholders without the information necessary to make informed comments on EPA regulatory actions," the inspector general's report warned, as the AP reported.
The rule in question pertains to "glider trucks," which are trucks with older engines that do not meet current air pollution rules, but were set to impose emissions standards and production limits in January 2018. Glider trucks are a booming sector of the cargo industry, in which an older diesel engine is refitted with a new big rig body. Emission tests show that glider trucks are far more damaging to people's health than trucks with newer engines, emitting up to several hundred times the amount of certain pollutions, according to the AP.
The New York Times reported that EPA scientists found that these older diesel engines can emit up to 55 times more soot than newer trucks.
The rush to pass the Glider Repeal Rule came after Pruitt met with several executives from Fitzgerald Glider Kits, the largest maker of gliders. Following, the executives welcomed Donald Trump to one of their plants during the 2016 campaign, as the AP reported.
The EPA watchdog found in the report that "Administrator Pruitt directed that the Glider Repeal Rule be promulgated as quickly as possible," without conducting the necessary studies required to implement the rule.
Two years ago, an EPA official wrote in an email that the Glider Repeal Rule did not "attempt to provide any of the cost/benefit type analysis" typically required for rules that are considered economically significant, according to CNN.
"It is my understanding that such analysis (and data) does not exist; that such analysis will not be produced in the timeframe in which we are working; and that, in any event, if such analysis were ever to be produced, it would most likely not be as 'supportive' of the proposal as OMB and others might like," reads the email.
The inspector general wrote that the agency should return to square one.
"We recommend that the agency identify for the public the substantive change to the proposed rule made at the suggestion or recommendation of OIRA, conduct the required analyses prior to finalizing the repeal, provide the public a means to comment on the analyses supporting the rulemaking, and document the decisions made," the report says.
The two Democratic lawmakers who requested the inspector-general's review, Sen. Tom Carper of Delaware and Sen. Tom Udall of New Mexico, said the report showed "the troubling extent to which the Trump EPA went to break the law and abuse the regulatory process in order to benefit individual political benefactors from the glider truck industry," according to the AP.
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By Katherine Kornei
Clear-cutting a forest is relatively easy—just pick a tree and start chopping. But there are benefits to more sophisticated forest management. One technique—which involves repeatedly harvesting smaller trees every 30 or so years but leaving an upper story of larger trees for longer periods (60, 90, or 120 years)—ensures a steady supply of both firewood and construction timber.
A Pattern in the Rings
<p>The <a href="https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/dictionaries-thesauruses-pictures-and-press-releases/coppice-standards-0" target="_blank">coppice-with-standards</a> management practice produces a two-story forest, said <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Bernhard_Muigg" target="_blank">Bernhard Muigg</a>, a dendrochronologist at the University of Freiburg in Germany. "You have an upper story of single trees that are allowed to grow for several understory generations."</p><p>That arrangement imprints a characteristic tree ring pattern in a forest's upper story trees (the "standards"): thick rings indicative of heavy growth, which show up at regular intervals as the surrounding smaller trees are cut down. "The trees are growing faster," said Muigg. "You can really see it with your naked eye."</p><p>Muigg and his collaborators characterized that <a href="https://ltrr.arizona.edu/about/treerings" target="_blank">dendrochronological pattern</a> in 161 oak trees growing in central Germany, one of the few remaining sites in Europe with actively managed coppice-with-standards forests. They found up to nine cycles of heavy growth in the trees, the oldest of which was planted in 1761. The researchers then turned to a historical data set — more than 2,000 oak <a href="https://eos.org/articles/podcast-discovering-europes-history-through-its-timbers" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">timbers from buildings and archaeological sites</a> in Germany and France dating from between 300 and 2015 — to look for a similar pattern.</p>A Gap of 500 Years
<p>The team found wood with the characteristic coppice-with-standards tree ring pattern dating to as early as the 6th century. That was a surprise, Muigg and his colleagues concluded, because the first mention of this forest management practice in historical documents occurred only roughly 500 years later, in the 13th century.</p><p>It's probable that forest management practices were not well documented prior to the High Middle Ages (1000–1250), the researchers suggested. "Forests are mainly mentioned in the context of royal hunting interests or donations," said Muigg. Dendrochronological studies are particularly important because they can reveal information not captured by a sparse historical record, he added.</p><p>These results were <a href="https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-020-78933-8" target="_blank">published in December in <em>Scientific Reports</em></a>.</p><p>"It's nice to see the longevity and the history of coppice-with-standards," said <a href="https://www.teagasc.ie/contact/staff-directory/s/ian-short/" target="_blank">Ian Short</a>, a forestry researcher at Teagasc, the Agriculture and Food Development Authority in Ireland, not involved in the research. This technique is valuable because it promotes conservation and habitat biodiversity, Short said. "In the next 10 or 20 years, I think we'll see more coppice-with-standards coming back into production."</p><p>In the future, Muigg and his collaborators hope to analyze a larger sample of historic timbers to trace how the coppice-with-standards practice spread throughout Europe. It will be interesting to understand where this technique originated and how it propagated, said Muigg, and there are plenty of old pieces of wood waiting to be analyzed. "There [are] tons of dendrochronological data."</p><p><em><a href="mailto:katherine.kornei@gmail.com" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Katherine Kornei</a> is a freelance science journalist covering Earth and space science. Her bylines frequently appear in Eos, Science, and The New York Times. Katherine holds a Ph.D. in astronomy from the University of California, Los Angeles.</em></p><p><em>This story originally appeared in <a href="https://eos.org/articles/tree-rings-reveal-how-ancient-forests-were-managed" target="_blank">Eos</a></em> <em>and is republished here as part of Covering Climate Now, a global journalism collaboration strengthening coverage of the climate story.</em></p>Earth's ice is melting 57 percent faster than in the 1990s and the world has lost more than 28 trillion tons of ice since 1994, research published Monday in The Cryosphere shows.
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